★★
“Poster 1, Movie 0.”
I have some friends – people whose opinions I typically respect – who swear by Jesus (Jess) Franco. For example, Tony, who used to run Psychotronic Video in London, and whose all-time favourite movie is Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! This is clearly a man of taste. But he also like Franco movies. Me? God knows, I’ve tried. On multiple occasions. Sober and drunk. But the vast majority of the ones I’ve seen seem like mediocre hack jobs, showing no directorial talent at all. The one I might give a pass to is Faceless, which is lurid enough to be fun. But otherwise? Plodding and dull, despite the typical presence of some undeniably attractive lead actresses. This does not break that mould.
It was just in a number of films featuring the two lead characters, a pair of female detectives called the Red Lips. There’s the blonde Regina (Vanni) and the redheaded Diana (Renaud). Here, they are hired by businessmen Mr. Radek for $50,000, to investigate the disappearance of Lita Regnier, a model who is the latest in a series of mysteriously abducted beautiful women. The trail eventually leads the due to enigmatic, reclusive painter and sculptor Karl Tiller (Hoven), for whom Lita had previously modelled. Turns out he’s a bit mad. Along with his werewolf-like assistant Morpho (Lemoine), who does the actual abductions, Tiller photographs the women as they’re being terrorized and murdered by Morpho, and turns the corpses into statues.
If this sounds vaguely familiar, it’s because Franco is ripping off ideas from previous, much better, movies, such as Peeping Tom and House of Wax. Of course, there are a lot of other influences too, from the Bond films through to Danger: Diabolik and the other Euro-crime movies popular in the decade. Franco’s inability to stage scenes in ways that generate the slightest excitement, more than counterbalance the fact that he has lovely eye-candy in the shapely shapes of his two leads. The problem is, far too many scenes which are only of tangential relation to the main story, such as the go-go dancing, or romantic dalliances for one of the Red Lips, more or less unnecessary to the plot.
Initially, it seemed as if this might be a parody along the lines of Our Man Flint. Virtually the first time we see Regina, she is naked under the sheets in bed and breaks the fourth wall to proclaim to the viewer that she can’t possibly get up unless we look elsewhere – the camera duly obliges by staying on her face in medium close-up. But consistency would be too much to expect from Franco, and there’s nothing like it the rest of the way. Nor, despite that genuinely impressive poster, is there much in the way of action. Even when a bomb in a bouquet is delivered, our heroines don’t open a window and toss it out. No, they run through the house with it, down the stairs and over next to the swimming pool before tossing it away. I do not find such idiocy endearing or amusing.
Dir: Jesus Franco
Star: Janine Reynaud, Rosanna Yanni, Adrian Hoven, Michel Lemoine
a.k.a. Sadisterotica